latest news

6/10/02

Michael Foot's labour of love, BeebIt, continues to be
built upon and improved and has now reached version 0.45. New features in this release allow
both FireTrack and the water levels in Exile to work, both of which are impressive
achievements! There are also various other improvements in accuracy which allow, for example,
the flashing colours in Psycastria 2 to work properly, as well as the usual round of
bug fixes.

Version 0.4 of BeebIt is now available, adding full BBC Master emulation as well as more accurate sound emulation and a raft of speed-ups, fixes and other improvements. You can download it from from Michael's website (or from Acorn Gaming).

6/4/02

David McEwen has updated a couple of his emulators - this was actually back in January, so
sorry for the delayed news story! SMSPlus has been upgraded to version
0.94a, which enables sound and contains a speed throttle, whilst DGen
reaches version 1.21 beta which brings more speed and a stack of other improvements.

Michael Foot has released a test version of his current build of
BeebIt adding the new components referred to in the story
for the 12/11/01 below. This new release is only a test so should be treated as such because
Michael says "it may break some things", but it runs nearly 20% faster which is certainly pretty
impressive! You can download it from Michael's
website (or from Acorn Gaming). Apply it as an update to
the existing 0.30beta version by copying it over it.

12/11/01

David McEwen's RiscCPS, the arcade game emulator
written specifically for RISC OS, has been updated and now supports Neo Geo games too. In fact
I must apologise to David for having ignored his emails telling me about updates over the past
month or two - I've been rather busy but it's no excuse! It's a fantastic piece of work and it
deserves all the publicity it can get - without doubt it's the best source of high-quality
free games you're going to find on Acorns in the foreseeable future. It's currently on version
1.25a and is available, along with details of what's new, from David's website - as are all his other free
emulator downloads.

David has also updated his own port
of SNES9X which, as the news item below for the 15th of August
records, replaced the earlier port by Gareth Long. This new release is version 1.6 and
officially it's a pre-release copy because although everything else works fine it will crash
if you run games which use Super FX (games which used additional 3D hardware in their carts).
Version 1.6 offers much improved DSP1 emulation and the RISC OS version has been speeded up
when both high-resolution and filtering are disabled.

Work on BeebIt continues apace. Michael Foot reports that someone has donated
a BBC filing system and set of related utilities for the emulator which he's integrating into
BeebIt to make it easier than ever to use existing disc images and to convert files
between the various formats. There have also been a few small bug fixes and he's hoping to
speed the emulation up even further. Michael is also considering breaking the emulator up
into pluggable parts which would allow any programmer to swap in their own components such
as a different 6502 emulation and so on.

Rich Mackin's SegaMS project seems to have gone quiet - see
the story from the 15th August below.

30/8/2001

This past weekend saw the second release of RiscCPS, with version 1.1 serving up support for
17 more games, bringing the total range supported to a not unimpressive 40 arcade titles, with
the new set of working ROMs including X-Men versus Streetfighter, Vampire: The Night Warriors, Dinosaurs and
Cadillacs. The new release also sees various bug fixes. David says he's going to be
pretty busy in the near future and so there won't be any further updates for a few weeks at
least.

Rather specialised in terms of interest, but Rich Mackin
has announced that not only is he working on a Sega emulator, SegaMS
(see story dated 15/8), but he's also built an ARM-code version of the 6502 processor which he's
called 65Engine. This
should be available from his website some time soon, he says.

25/8/2001

Following hot on the heels of its initial release, it looks like there'll be a new version of
the Capcom Play emulator, RiscCPS, out soon. David has added support
for more games, such as Darkstalkers, Warriors of Fate, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs,
and once he's fixed a few more problems with other games he's aiming to release the new build. In the
slightly longer term he's hoping to optimise the graphics routines enough to enable his already-implemented
sound support.

David Sharp's Acorn Emulation Page is back!
After over two years without even one update he's now brought much of the site back up to date and is
working on getting the remainder done. The site has a huge amount of stuff on and is well worth a look -
there's loads to read and plenty of pretty game screenshots to look at. :)

15/8/2001

David McEwen has done more than just resurrect his website which has been
offline recently - he's created a brand new emulator from scratch and made it available for download from his
site. RiscCPS is a Capcom Play System emulator which emulates CPS1 and CPS2, but if that doesn't
mean much then all you need to know is that it's an arcade system which featured games such as Street Fighter (and SF 2),
Strider, Ghouls and Ghosts and Final Fight. To run it at a playable speed you do need a
StrongARM, however, with a minimum of 24MB, and there's currently no sound because the emulator isn't quite
fast enough yet to provide it at a decent quality. Pretty impressive stuff, all in all! You can download it
from David's website (recommended, to ensure the very latest version)
or from Acorn Gaming's downloads section.

That "details soon" promised on the 6th of February (sorry!) - David released his own port of
SNES9X, which had previously lain untouched since Gareth Long last updated his port back on the 8th October 1999.
David's port of version 1.5 pre-released supersedes Gareth's 1.26 beta 4.0, although since they're separate
ports I've made both versions available on the Acorn Gaming emulator downloads
page - or you can fetch the new version from David's website.

More of that "soon" stuff - Michael Foot's wonderful free BBC emulator, BeebIt,
was updated back in February to version 0.30beta, which added flashing cursors, some bug fixes and a whole heap
of extra speed! Anyway, you can download it from Michael's website or I've (finally) updated the copy in the Acorn Gaming downloads section.

Andreas Dehmel has updated his multiple Commodore machine emulator VICE to the latest version 1.7,
just two days after the PC release - not bad! VICE emulates the C64, C128, CBM2, PET and VIC20 and even includes a VSID player to
listen to the C64's allegedly-classic music!

Rich Mackin is working on yet another Sega Master System and Game Gear emulator, making this the most popular machine to
emulate on Acorns, drawing level with the BBC itself in level of interest! His homepage
contains a diary chronicling the progress made to date - sounds like it's getting pretty near to completion!